(MCT) — SEATTLE — The Department of Justice announced Wednesday it will not appeal the 37-year sentence handed down to would-be “millennium bomber” Ahmed Ressam, ending more than a decade of legal wrangling over how long the al-Qaida-trained Algerian should be imprisoned for the plot to detonate a suitcase bomb at the Los Angeles International Airport.

During Ressam’s third sentencing last month in U.S. District Court in Seattle, Justice Department prosecutors had asked Judge John Coughenour to sentence Ressam to life, arguing that he remained a threat to national security and that he had reneged on his agreement to cooperate in the prosecutions of two other suspected terrorists who had helped him.